Economic Growth, Climate Change and the G20: A View from Civil Society
A summary of the proceedings from the APCSE conference on Economic Growth, Climate Change and the G20 is now available on Medium.com
A summary of the proceedings from the APCSE conference on Economic Growth, Climate Change and the G20 is now available on Medium.com
In this presentation, I essentially make the point that community engagement should not be viewed as an add-on; an act of charity or something purely philanthropic.
Doing what you love, and loving what you do has become a bit of cliche, but it is not just the route to personal fulfilment. In a resource-constrained, post-GFC world, with the imminent threat of potentially catastrophic climate change, building socially and ecologically resilient communities is of critical importance.
Community engagement, therefore, should not just be something you do in your spare time. It needs to be the way you live your life. I should define who you are.
There has been some speculation in recent weeks as why 16,000 dead pigs floated down the Huangpu River. The rotting carcasses threatened the water supplies of those depending on this river system including the 23 million inhabitants of Shanghai. (Now, to add insult to injury, there are dead ducks to contend with as well).
Characteristically, there has been plenty of sooth-saying from Chinese government officials, but the scepticism aired on Chinese social media platform Weibo suggests that this is doing little to reassure residents.
The problem, according to a report in The Guardian yesterday, is the sheer scale of pig production. Last year, China produced and consumed half the world’s pork (about 50m tonnes), and with a mortality rate of 2-4%, up to 300,000 carcasses need to be disposed of each year. Things become difficult when the capacity to process dead pigs does not keep up with the growing number of pig farms. Until now, it seems, this issue has been managed by some ‘entrepreneurs’ who have been buying up dead and diseased pigs and butchering them for sale as pork to unsuspecting consumers. A crackdown on black market traders has put a stop to all this and so farmers have resorted to dumping the carcasses in the river.
Mainstream economics refers to this as a ‘negative externality’ arising from a market transaction. I call it wanton destruction of natural capital, fuelled by rampant consumption and unsustainable production. GDP will go as a result of the expenditure required to rid the waterways of dead animals, but this is not economic development.
The world did not end in 2012 as the Mayans predicted, but as George Monbiot documents in a superbly authored piece in The Guardian the other day, humankind is certainly doing its best to engineer such an outcome. The article is a superb summary of my feelings about 2012, and why it is likely to be remembered as the year we did least at the time we needed to do most.
It is probably a little harsh to lay the entire blame with humankind in the broad sense. It is our political representatives that are most at fault, as inaction has come to characterise discourse at both national and international levels.
To talk of keeping the average temperature increase to 2 degrees or less by the end of the century now appears to be sheer folly. Meanwhile, biodiversity loss is intensifying at an alarming rate with some quite profound consequences for human survival on the planet.
Where will the leadership come from in 2013?
Paul Gilding tells us it is the end of economic growth. Not only is the earth full, but we have gone beyond its carrying capacity. In other words, we are over the credit limit on the ecological ‘credit card’ and now we are starting to experience the consequences. The question is, do we restructure to get back within our ‘ecological budget constraint’, or are we intent on becoming extras in a Mad Max type world?
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_Ou1A9F9y4&feature=plcp]
This clip is a mashup of Paul Gilding’s TED talk The Earth is Full. I stumbled across it when searching for an engaging summary of the key messages in Gilding’s The Great Disruption for my MBA class at the Reims Management School in France.
Gilding’s TED talk is fine, but a little wordy, and TheSustainableMan does a great job of editing the speech, picking out key sound bytes and matching them with appropriate imagery from The 11th Hour and a host of other clips advocating sustainability.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ueJ0E-H7hkk]
There has been a fair bit of commentary of late with respect to a looming tipping point, whereupon some social-ecological systems will collapse because they will no longer be able to withstand the pressure placed upon them by humankind. A recent article published in Nature is certainly generating some interest, and it occurred to me that it may be sooner rather than later that the resilience theorists will have their moment in the sun (if you will excuse the pun).
In essence, what this group tells us is that nature is pretty resilient, but there comes a point where it will simply not take any more abuse, a threshold is crossed, and the social-ecological system enters a new regime, where there is no going back to the old regime; e.g. once land becomes desertified it is a process that is difficult to reverse. If — as the Nature piece documents — by 2025, humans will have modified half of all the land on Earth, and by 2060, 70 percent of the earth’s surface could be covered with human development, then clearly if we are to sustain ourselves and coexist with other species with the natural capital we have at our disposal, we need to think far more strategically about the management of social-ecological systems.
For a prime example of legislators doing the exact opposite, read this article on the measurement of sea level rises in North Carolina. Extraordinary as this may sound, while scientists are predicting that the sea level along the coast of North Carolina could rise by about a metre by the end of the century, policymakers plan to deal with the issue by writing a law requiring projections only be based on historical data, appeasing business interests in the state that are worried gloomy predictions about climate-induced sea level rise will make it harder for them to develop the coast line.
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This TED talk is a useful summary of Paul Gilding’s book, The Great DIsruption. Listening to the first half of his presentation, one could be forgiven for thinking that Gilding has thrown in the towel, based on his projected level of doom and gloom. This is not entirely the case. Yes, things do look grim, but Gilding is not nearly as pessimistic as James Lovelock or Clive Hamilton. The book goes into great detail as why he (and his collaborator Jorgen Randers) believe there is a future for humanity with their One Degree War Plan.
I was trying to find some recent data on climate refugees just now because of the controversy (in some quarters) over inaccurate UN projections (which, it seems, did not emanate from the UN at all). A Wikipedia site is of considerable assistance in this regard in that, while noting the conceptual problems, it does not dismiss the issue of ‘environmental migrants’. I’m reminded of an anonymous quotation on the definition of an economist I came across once, that read something along the lines of ‘someone who sees something in practice as asks whether it works in theory’. Does it really matter if there are 50 million climate refugees in 2010, 2020 or 2030? Is it somehow acceptable if it is an event that occurs 10 or 20 years from now? Or is it less of an issue because we are not sure whether a person can or cannot be counted because it is not possible to prove conclusively whether they were displaced because of environmental factors or war that may or may not have been caused by deteriorating environmental resources?
My challenge to the skeptics would be to watch this movie and then present a convincing argument that displaced persons arising from environmental factors is decreasing or not deviating from any historical trend. Furthermore, maybe if some of the climate change skeptics within government circles could bring themselves to watch it, they would spend less time trying to argue against the science and recognise that, whether they believe in the science or not, the consequences of climate change are sitting on their door step right now in the shape of a ‘national security problem’.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sc4HxPxNrZ0]
We live in an increasingly full world. During 2011 we pass the 7 billion mark. This means that world population has more than doubled during my lifetime. When J.F. Kennedy was President of the United States, humankind numbered a mere 3 billion. How has it been possible to sustain such burgeoning population growth? Answer: access to fossil fuel energy that has enabled huge increases in productivity. Back in 1800, before the industrial revolution took hold, production could only sustain 1 billion. Is the globe over-populated by the human species? On the face of it — yes, but not necessarily. The real problem is social justice (or the lack thereof) and failure to live within our ‘ecological budget constraint’. Based on the current business-as-usual model, we exceeded the carrying capacity of the Earth in the mid-1980s. In a non-polluting, renewable energy-fuelled world based on the principles of intra- and inter-generational equity, a population of 7 billion human beings may be sustainable.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HN9j0y9bivo]
Millions of tonnes of plastic floating around in the Pacific constitute one of the largest — if not the largest — rubbish dumps in the world, and covers an area bigger than the US according to one account. Out of sight, out of mind? Maybe, but if you eat seafood, probably not out of your digestive system. Still, what harm is a bit of plastic going to do? The Crápola Islands is on the look out for new ‘citizens’. This rapidly accumulating land mass in the heart of the Pacific Ocean is a product of ‘modern living’ and comprises a veritable cornucopia of plastics. Not enough toxicity in your life? This could be the place for you.